Plantstoria

The exhibition explores the history of a residential district in Ciechanów, Poland, built during the German occupation in World War II. Similar housing projects, colloquially known as "Berlinki" or "poniemieckie" ("post-German"), can still be found in many cities across the country today. The exhibition's curator and architect, Barbara Nawrocka, examines this architectural heritage from the perspective of nature and landscape, demonstrating how plant life, history, politics, and collective memory intertwine.

The district was conceived in the early 1940s as a so-called garden suburb—a housing development for German civil servants and their families in the capital of the newly created Zichenau administrative district. The concept embraced the utopian, originally progressive ideas of the garden city movement led by British social reformer Ebenezer Howard, but here it became a tool of National Socialist colonization and propaganda.